“We all live surrounded by three rows of fences, in a courtyard with a stump behind which you get fucked,” she says. “Just like the characters in this play you’re closing.”
They both know that the scene from Ostrovsky is a metaphor not only for life in their motherland but also for the dead end of their own nonlife together. Maybe she should tell him she no longer believes in the sentimental nonsense about connected souls and unbreakable bonds. Several years of working in repertory theater have successfully wiped out all vestiges of that hope.
He stops to peer into her face, and they stand there for a few moments, bathed in red, searching for a trace of something in each other that may still be there. Then he lowers his eyes and reaches for a pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket. They are Marlboros, the American brand they hear about only from jammed broadcasts of the BBC, and it occurs to Sasha that he must be climbing the Party ladder. He offers her one, and for a few minutes, they walk silently, inhaling capitalist tobacco so scandalously better than their own.
“Maybe you were right to leave Ivanovo when you did after all,” he says, stopping in front of a courtyard that seems to shimmer under an ordinary-looking archway, so painfully beautiful that for an instant, Sasha wonders if she has been blessed with a mirage. A wrought-iron bench glistens under a tree, and a marble statue, white and seemingly glowing, stretches its arm in their direction, in a puzzling gesture of either invitation or forbiddance. “Are you happy?” he asks. “Now that you’ve become an actress?”
She doesn’t know if he wants her to answer the first, existential, question or to attach the second, qualifying, half to it, but she knows that it is safer to remain within the confines of acting. The answers to these two questions, if she is honest, are diametric opposites: no, she’s not happy without him and yes, she is happy when she is onstage. She is happy to be breathing in the damp smell of wool from his coat. She is unhappy that they can’t go to her apartment, tear off their clothes, as they did three years ago, and ravage each other until they both melt and start coursing through each other’s veins like lifeblood.
“Acting is freedom. It’s searching for what’s real,” she says. “Every performance is different. Together with the other actors onstage and with the audience, I search for the truth—we all do—and sometimes we almost find it. That’s the essence of acting: looking for the truth. There is nothing fake about it. There is no pretending.”
They walk inside the courtyard and sit on the bench, which is freezing cold and damp from wet snow.
“So it is the opposite of our life here.”
“It’s the opposite of your job,” she says. “The opposite of banning plays that fail to lead the audience into the shining future. It is allowing people to think, to examine their failings and their faults, to peek into the dark corners of the soul. To see human beings as they are, not as we think they should be. Maybe that’s the reason Theater is so dangerous.”
He smirks, or maybe she only thinks she sees him smirk.
“Last time I saw you,” he says, and she hears an intake of breath, “I came to tell you what I’d done. I wanted to confess to you. I hated myself and wanted to tell you the truth. My truth.”
They are both silent for a minute.
“My wife is a good woman,” he says, fumbling inside his pockets, as if he were looking for something and not finding it. “I only wish she’d found someone better than me, someone more deserving. I don’t love her, and I never did.” He plays with a pack of matches he has fished out of his pocket. “She fell in love with me the first time we met, the daughter of my boss, someone to whom I owed everything. He took a big chance on me when I had nothing, not even a pair of shoes to wear to the office. Anyway, she begged him to do whatever he could to get me to marry her, even if it meant twisting my arm. She sensed that I was in love with someone else, but that didn’t stop her. She just refused to feel humiliated. She wanted me, and nothing else mattered.” Andrei lights a cigarette he finally finds in his pocket, inhales, and lets the smoke extinguish a whirl of snowflakes. “A pathetic story, isn’t it?”
He pauses, and from the corner of her eye, Sasha sees him bite his lower lip, as if getting ready to tell her something. For a few seconds, he seems on the verge of letting the words out, but then he looks away. She sees his hand with the cigarette tremble, or maybe he is simply shaking off the ashes. “My father-in-law has been diagnosed with cancer,” he finally says. “He needs surgery and then radiation. My wife is devastated. If she didn’t have me, she would fall apart.”